


Grateful for All This

by The_Jeneral



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Angst, But Spoilers for S1M9, But give me time, Friendship, Gen, Not Runner Five/Sam yet, Takes place before S1M8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-14 00:16:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Jeneral/pseuds/The_Jeneral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's not the only one who, sometimes, is just a little bit glad that there was a zombie apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grateful for All This

**Author's Note:**

> There are times that running for Abel Township is more desirable than my real life. One day, after a craptastic day at my secretarial job, I came home and said "When the zombie apocalypse comes, no one will care how fast I can type." And then I wrote this. I'm enjoying putting my incarnation of Runner Five down on paper. I like who I am when I run as her.
> 
> All of Sam's dialogue is lifted straight from the game. Thank God for the new "missions" tab in ZombieLink so I could listen to that bit a few times.

I heard a familiar _ker-thunk_ coming from the other room, and my heart sank. The copier had jammed again, and I was the only one in the whole damn office who knew how to fix it. Which meant I was about to spend the next fifteen minutes with my arms buried in the bowels of the machine, ending up with a burn on my forearm and liberally sprinkled with toner dust. I had picked the wrong day to wear a white blouse to work. 

“How are you coming on that report?” The voice from just behind my left shoulder made me jump almost a foot in the air. My boss always seemed to know when to stop by my desk and give me a heart attack.

“Fine,” I replied. I was lying. I still had dozens of pages of data to collate before I could even begin to put a coherent report together. And now I had to fix the copier, too. As I headed toward the copy room, I could hear the faint echo of my boss’s reminder that he really needed that report by five. 

Ten minutes later, the copier was unjammed, and I looked like I had spent a couple of hours in a coal mine. Back at my desk, I had plowed through a couple more pages when my phone rang. 

“Still married to that career?” My mom was really good at making that little clucking sound with her tongue. “You’re never going to get a boyfriend if you work all the time.”

“Where’s that report?” I almost dropped the phone. My boss was like a ninja. I hung up on my mother and gestured to the clock.

“I still have time,” I said. “It’s not even noon yet.” My voice faltered when I looked up at the clock to see that the time read 4:45. When the hell had that happened? “Okay.” I thought hard, tried to regroup fast. “Give me a few minutes. There’s only a few pages…” But I looked down at my desk, and there were significantly more pieces of paper than had been there just a minute ago. And they were all out of order. “Okay,” I said again. “I can get through this. Let me…” I turned back to my computer, entered a little more data, hit control-s to save. My computer froze. The screen turned blue.

“Oh, God,” I breathed. I couldn’t finish the report. I was going to get fired.

My phone rang again.

“Don’t slump in your chair, dear,” my mom said. “You will never give me any grandchildren if you don’t practice good ergonomics.”

_Ker-thunk!_ There went the copier again. I whirled my head around to look at the copy room …

… and almost hit the floor as my body twisted violently, shaking itself out of the dream and almost all the way off of my little army cot. At first I couldn’t move, all I could do was gasp for air. My blanket was wound around my legs, and I had no idea where my pillow had ended up. I panted for a few seconds, and as my heart slowed I concentrated on bringing my breathing back down to normal too. “It’s okay,” I told myself. It had been a dream. Just a dream. I didn’t have a report due at five. I didn’t have a boss hanging over my shoulder. My mother wasn’t bugging me every five minutes to settle down, get married, and start producing grandchildren. And I would never, ever, have to unjam that damned copier again.

Of course, I reminded myself as I shook out my blanket and retrieved my pillow from the floor underneath my cot, the reality was much much worse. My office building, along with most of the rest of the downtown area, had burned to the ground in the early days of the zombie apocalypse. My boss had been eaten by the accounting staff, at least that’s what my best friend told me, back in that short time when we had still had cell phone reception. I had no idea what had become of my mother, or any of the rest of my family – they were all back in the U.S. I had been on the other side of the Atlantic, vacationing in London when it all happened. Mom had planned to come with me, but had changed her mind. She didn’t like tea, she had said at the time. We had talked and texted as long as we could, but then of course the power went, the cell towers went down, and batteries drained. With an ocean between us now, I had no way of knowing if she was still alive. 

Yes, the reality was much worse. So why did I feel so relieved? It was an awful feeling, to be glad that the apocalypse had happened. I pushed the thought aside – it was too terrible to even think about. Not if I wanted to get back to sleep. 

And I needed to get some rest. I was scheduled to run in the morning, and I had a feeling I would need to be sharp for this one. Last night during dinner I had noticed Sam and Janine talking, and a couple of times they had looked in my direction – Janine’s look had been appraising, while Sam looked vaguely guilty. If I had to hazard a guess, she had some super-secret mission that Sam had just volunteered me for. The chances of finding out beforehand were slim to none: all of Abel Township was on a need to know basis according to Janine.

_Oh well_ , I thought as I drifted off. _It’s just a run. Whatever it is, it’s not going back to work at that dead-end job with its broken copier and five lousy vacation days a year._

###

“You know what’s really bad, Runner Five? You know what’s really, really just horrible?” Sam’s voice was a hushed whisper through my headset, a testament to both the late hour and the toll that talking all night had taken on him.

“Worse than this? Can’t imagine,” I murmured, keeping my voice down as I picked my way over a fallen log in the pitch dark. The past couple hours had been okay; the zoms had kept their distance, and I was almost to the edge of the woods. Now that I had picked up Sam in my headset again, I was starting to think that maybe I had a chance, maybe I’d make it back to Abel Township. It hadn’t helped that Sam had already started speculating that I was dead, but I guess I couldn’t blame him for that. Fourth Runner Five and all that.

“This, what I’m doing right now, is what I wanted to do. I used to mess around at the radio station at uni, I wanted to talk on-air or work behind the scenes or something. And I thought maybe if I failed my degree that my parents would just let me go and do what I wanted.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I said. I thought of my mother, back home in the States, perplexed that I’d graduated college without finding a husband (I think she thought they were handed out with the degree). She’d gotten married during her senior year of college, and didn’t understand why I didn’t do the same. We’d butted heads on that for a good year or two until she accepted that I wasn’t ready for marriage and children yet. That I wanted to see the world. I snorted now at the thought. Some European vacation this had turned out to be.

Sam sighed, a rush of breath in my ear. “Yeah. No, probably they wouldn’t.” I quirked my lips up in a smile. It was almost like he could hear me. But I knew he couldn’t; at some point in the night – probably when I had taken a header into a ditch I couldn’t see in the dark – the microphone on my headset had crapped out. If I made it back to Abel alive, Janine was going to kill me.

Sam kept on talking. “What’s really, really bad is … some days … some days I’m grateful for all this.” His short bark of laughter sounded broken, and his voice was hesitant and harsh, the words almost tearing out of his throat. He was talking to me, ostensibly, anyway, but I was pretty sure that at this point I had just become a vehicle. Someone for him to address while he confessed his thoughts to the night. He didn’t know or care if I was actually listening. “Because I don’t have to get up in the morning and go to classes and pretend… pretend I care about engineering.”

I stopped moving. Just for a couple seconds, as I absorbed what he said. “Oh, Sam.” The words sighed out of me. He sounded ashamed, his voice shattering a little at his confession while he tried to cover it with a laugh. I could understand the feeling. I’d felt that same rush of shame last night – was it only last night? – when I woke up from that nightmare about work and had felt so relieved that all I had to do these days was run for my life from zombies.

“I’ll… I’ll be right back,” Sam muttered, and he was gone. 

“No!” The word tore out of me, much louder than I had intended. I didn’t want him to go, didn’t want him to stop talking. I skirted the edge of the forest and headed up the hill with a purpose: I needed to get back to Abel. Because I wanted to live, yes. Obviously. But also because I couldn’t bear for Sam to feel ashamed of himself. To think he was the only one who, sometimes, as screwed up as it was, was just a little bit grateful that there had been a zombie apocalypse. 

The moon was bright when I reached the top of the hill, and to the west I could see a few shamblers silhouetted against the night. Four, maybe five of them. They’d spot me soon. But straight ahead and to the east, I saw, way the hell off in the distance, a blinking red light. The beacon. Abel Township. Home.

The groans from the zoms were audible now. They were coming. Time to run.


End file.
